Email Marketing: Email Deliverability - Part 1 (Watch This Before You Send Your Next Email Campaign)

All right, so Jesse, we started recording. This is gonna go out to my newsletter as mentioned. I'm seeing a lot of demand for deliverability. While I know a lot, I know you know even more. So for everyone listening, Jesse's a buddy that I've met online. We've done a bunch of conversations and chats together and a lot of geeking out on deliverability and I wanted to bring him on here as he'll do a much better job speaking about deliverability. So we're gonna dive into some questions and at the very end, Jesse kind of get more of his background and what he's working on and whatnot. Jesse, how are you, bud? I'm good, man. Can't wait to dive into it. It's pretty crazy that deliverability was the most popular topic. I never thought that would be a thing, but I guess it is. Yeah, I'm surprised. So for context, I posted a tweet the other day and one person asked, hey, can we learn about email deliverability? We get about 25 people actually like it and said that they wanted to learn as well. So that's the kind of the context behind what Jesse's saying right now. Jesse, when someone talks about email deliverability, break it down for like a beginner. What does email deliverability actually mean and whatnot? Yeah, I think I'll go over a few different analogies to explain it, but at its simplest form, the best way to think about it is every time Christmas comes around and you're gonna send a package to maybe a family member or a cousin or someone important and let's say the package is worth a couple hundred dollars or it could be worth a lot of money, it's important to you. When you go to get it shipped off, one of the first things you're gonna do is make sure that you get tracking to see where it got delivered because at the end of the day, if you're sending something that's important and it doesn't get delivered, that's gonna cost you money, the person's gonna be upset. So when we think of the most basic form of deliverability, it's getting your message or getting your package from point A to point B. And when we talk about deliverability, that's different than delivery. Delivery refers to, is your message going to bounce? Does it actually, so a message can get sent and did it actually get delivered? That's different than deliverability, which refers to, did the message go to the inbox, did it go to the promotions or did it go to spam? So that's like the most basic form and then if I was to dive into it a little bit more in terms of like how complex it is, you can think of any type of company, when you go to a car dealership and you're gonna buy a brand new car, you can think of that as like having a company domain. So for example, I own mailgenius.com and we can send, so any company can send multiple types of emails, but everything's under the hood for one kind of thing. But you can send inbound emails, you can send outbound emails, you can send transactional emails. But in terms of deliverability and analogy, when you first get mailgenius.com or your company set up, the first thing you have to do before you drive off that lot is make sure that your license plate is good, your insurance is good and your registration is good. And it's the same thing with email deliverability. Before you even leave the lot and before you start sending emails, you should make sure that your emails are properly authenticated so that you take on ownership. And again, these best practices that I'm sharing, it's assuming that you're following, you have to be a good sender and people want to open and click your emails. If people aren't engaging in your emails in a great way, you don't get the full benefits of this. But yeah, so basically the first step is when you drive out of that lot, you wanna make sure that you have your license plate, your insurance and your registration. But that's only one element. So authentication is only one factor of deliverability. What's really important, there's two other elements you could think of is what's the makeup of your car? So in terms of like, what ESP are you using? Is it Clavio? Is it MailChimp? And then how do you have things configured internally? So that's like, again, maybe your engine, your tires, all of the makings of your car, which is extremely important because if you don't have things configured correctly, you probably won't have a lot of success. And then I think the last part, so you have the inner side of your car, you have the registration, all the logistics to be able to drive that car. But what's most important is your workflow. And that's gonna always determine your deliverability is how do you actually drive your car? And that's the number one thing that occurs when people have deliverability issues is because every time you're driving your car, if you're getting into a speeding ticket or you're running past a stop sign and you get pulled over, the cop's gonna say, okay, well, here's your ticket and that's gonna go on your driving record. And you have to think about it like this, is if you have a driving record depending on the severity of your infraction, that you can't just go back to your insurance provider and say, hey, can you make my rate cheaper? They're gonna say, look, you got an infraction and there's only gonna be a few options. You can only do so many things. You're either gonna be able to go to traffic school, get it cleared up, or you're just gonna have to become a perfect driver and not have any issues or headaches. But if you keep getting issues, what's gonna happen is your license is gonna get suspended and you're not gonna be able to drive. And it's the same exact thing with deliverability. If your messages are bouncing at a consistent rate, if people aren't opening or clicking, or if people marking the messages as spam, the insurance provider or the email filters will never let your message go to the inbox. It's always gonna go to the spam because you don't have a good enough driving record to fix it. So just to recap, if you do have deliverability issues and you are running into it, there is no quick fix. It's essentially like driving a car, your driving record or your reputation is affected. The only way to get back in the inbox is by positive engagement. So by continuing to drive that car, but to not run into any tickets, to not get any infractions. And over time, you're able to convince the insurance providers, look, I'm a good driver. Please give me the insurance, the rate that I deserve based on how I drive, and everything will settle itself over time. So that's kind of how I look at it. Dude, that's awesome. I love that. I know everyone's gonna be super stoked to learn about that. So it sounds like when you're first auditing or working with a client, but setting up kind of your own infrastructure, it's all kind of the authentication side. You've got to talk to us about what records you add to the DNS and kind of at a high level, what each of those records look like. I know there's a couple, if there's one or two or three that you feel are the most important, we can focus on those. Yeah, so when it comes to authentication, there's a few things that are important. I mean, I think I would say these things, some of them used to be something that was good to have, and then it's a good best practice. To be clear, I would say in the next year or the next few years, if not right now, these are no longer nice to haves. These are no longer best practices. These are required. If you don't authenticate your emails and take on ownership, you can still have good deliverability. You can still have success. But the reality is you need to set up authentication so you take on ownership of your reputation and you can establish it. This is super important so that you have consistent revenue generated from email and in any scenario where you were gonna switch ESP or move around, the most important factor is your domain reputation, which is how many people are opening, clicking, and engaging on your emails, and that'll follow you anywhere you go. So in terms of authentication, there's a few things that are important. I'll go over the top four, I guess, that are the most common and most important. Basically, it's gonna be SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and then there's a new one called BIMI, and I'll throw that in at the end just because it's not super important yet, but it will be more relevant because Gmail is gonna be adopting it. It's like the fourth layer of authentication. So SPF, you can think of that as when you get that brand new car, you need to have insurance for your car. And again, the setup for SPF might slightly vary depending on the ESP, depending on their infrastructure, and depending on what they say. This could change slightly between like SendGrid, Klaviyo, MailChimp. They're all slight deviations, but the foundation and fundamentals will be the same across any ESP. So SPF is Sender Policy Framework. It's kind of across the board for any ESP. And basically when you drive that car off the lot, the first thing, if you get pulled over, the cop's gonna say, can I see your insurance and can I see your license? So what needs to happen is that you need to have your name on your insurance to show that you're a designated driver. SPF works the same exact way. So for MailGenius, if we're sending emails from Google and we're sending emails from SendGrid, for example, I would need to go to my SPF record, which is a DNS record. And there's some fundamentals that you kind of have to assume to get into the super technicals, but basically you have your domain, you have your DNS settings. So wherever you bought your domain, typically this will be like a GoDaddy. You'll log into your GoDaddy settings, you'll click DNS, and that's where all your records are gonna be. This is important for any type of email authentication stuff. So when it comes to SPF, sending from MailGenius, we use Google and we use SendGrid. The first thing I'm gonna do is go to GoDaddy, I'm gonna add a text record, and then in terms of what I'm gonna put in that SPF record, it's gonna basically say, hey, include Google and include SendGrid. It's gonna explicitly say, these are the applications and services that I am using to send from MailGenius.com and they're authorized. So that if I get pulled over, if I ever have any issue, the first thing the cop checks is SPF, okay, MailGenius.com, oh, you're using Google.com, you're good to go. But in the scenario where you're not using Google, maybe I was using Office, he's gonna go, wait a second, this isn't listed in your record, therefore you're gonna fail SPF. And that's like the most basic form of authentication is SPF is the first layer. I don't know if you want me to stop there to talk about it a little bit or just keep going into DKIM, DMART, and BIM. You're crushing it, let's keep going. Okay, so that's SPF. Super important that you get this set up, super important. So again, if you're using MailChimp, for example, or you're using SendGrid, you're gonna have to go and depending on how you have it set up, you're gonna have to have an SPF record that says, hey, include SendGrid, include MailChimp. And I think the biggest takeaways for SPF in terms of things to remember is you can only have one SPF record, you can't have multiple, and you need to make sure it's updated anytime you change or have applications moving. So if you decide, hey, I'm getting off MailChimp today, I'm switching to Klaviyo tomorrow, you need to update your SPF record, get rid of MailChimp, and add in Klaviyo. And that's super important because there's a limit of lookups in an SPF record. So if you just keep throwing in and adding a bunch of applications and never deleting or updating it, I've seen a lot of companies who either have multiple records published, so it's failing, or they have too many applications in their SPF record, which causes a too many lookups error, which could also cause it to fail. So just keep, it's important and keep track of it and make sure it's always accurate in terms of what you're actually using to send emails from. It has to be completely up to date. And then DKIM, yeah, so DKIM is the second layer. So you think of this as like, so you have your insurance, but what's more important is your actual registration. And the main difference with your registration is it's gonna match your ID or driver's license and your registration. They go side by side and they explicitly say, hey, Jesse Hernandez is the owner of this car. It has it in its registration and it has to be a perfect match. You can think of DKIM as kind of the same exact way as that. What that is is basically it's a, there's a key that you publish on your end. So again, it's kind of a similar steps. You're gonna go to GoDaddy, you're gonna go to your DNS records, you're gonna copy and paste however they give you. They're gonna give, the ESPs will provide you this information. You'll copy and paste it. And the way it works is basically you're gonna send an email to someone, they're gonna read that key and they're gonna ping it against what you've posted publicly. So it's basically an encryption and a decryption. So you give them the public key and the server is gonna check and validate and make sure everything lines up. So to make it simpler, it's like the cop's pulling you over. He says, hey, license, registration, insurance, please. And when I hand him my driver's license and when I hand him my registration, he's going to make sure that, hey, this driver's license he has in his possession and the registration matches up perfectly. So it has to be a perfect one-to-one match. And DKIM is very important because it's the second layer of email authentication. So SPF is basically saying, hey, when you have your car insurance, you're saying, hey, here are the people that are allowed to drive my car. DKIM takes it a layer further and says, hey, not only are these people allowed to drive my car, but they have explicit ownership. They've been able to prove that they, whatever, whether the name's on the actual registration with me, they're taking it a layer further. They're not just saying, oh, we can list you anyone on the insurance. They're proving that they're actually on the title and they're on the registration. And this is very important. So when you're sending an email, the filters and the firewalls and providers, they want to see that, hey, is SPF passing and is DKIM passing? When they see that SPF is passing from your domain and they see that DKIM is passing, you're able to build that own reputation rather than just sending emails via the ESP. So when you send an email via SendGrid or via Klaviyo, there's pros and cons. The pros is that depending on your reputation, you might get much better deliverability because Klaviyo has so much positive engagement every day. The cons is that you're not actually establishing your own, you are, but you're not completely establishing your own domain reputation by fully authenticating with SPF, DKIM, and DMON. Dude, amazing. And then the last part is basically DMARC, or not the last part, but almost the last part is DMARC. And the way you can think of that is like, you got this brand new car, you have insurance, you have registration, but what's really important is this car is expensive and it's worth a lot of money. And if someone was to take your car and drive it on your behalf and crash it, who's responsible for it? You'd be liable, right? So DMARC is the exact same way. It's a security mechanism used to protect you from people stealing your car and driving it on your behalf. And also it's for you to keep track of things. So the way you could think of it is like, okay, well, I have insurance, I have registration, I have a license, I have all these things. But what it's saying is that I'm not allowed to actually drive my car until I can prove it. So I would actually imagine that like it's a scanner and it literally says, let me see your insurance. Let me see your ID card. Let me see your registration. All of these things need to pass. They would need to prove that you need to show your ID, you would need to show your insurance and you need to show your registration before you're able to drive the car. And that's how DMARC works. It's essentially something that's saying, hey, I'm only going to allow emails to be sent from this domain if they pass SPF or DKIM. And you could decide. So it gets pretty technical in terms of what you can do and how it works. But just to keep it simple, you set up DMARC. The first goal of DMARC is to set it up with a none policy because there's three different types of policies. Your number one goal is just setting it up and then getting reports basically. And the best way to do this is if you just Google Postmark DMARC, they have a free tool that anyone can use. It's called the DMARC Digest. So you basically just copy and paste their instructions and every Monday, they're going to send you an email that's going to say what percentage of emails are passing SPF and DKIM. And what you're basically doing is you're auditing your infrastructure to make sure that one, no one is sending unauthenticated emails on your behalf. It's super common, by the way. Someone could be spoofing, phishing, or hacking your accounts without you ever knowing. Every company I've been at previously, the CEO was spoofed. So it is a very common thing. It's not something that doesn't happen, especially the larger the company, it's more likely that this is occurring. And then the second thing is you're just making sure that if things are failing, you need to update them to include SPF and DKIM. So you're basically saying, wait a second, Google is failing SPF and DKIM. Let me set it up properly. So your goal is to set up everything with SPF and DKIM. And then once you've done that, you can change your policies and roll it out over time. So you go from a none policy to a quarantine policy and then to a reject policy. And again, this is over a few weeks. You're just monitoring, making sure things look good. Once things look good and you set up that reject policy, you've basically said, hey, now my car is completely secured and no one is allowed to drive my car unless they have everything that they can prove that they own it. And that's a big deal. It's very important for deliverability. It's important because it protects your domain from people phishing or spoofing, at least from your root domain. People can still phish or spoof, but they can't use your own domain, which is very important. And then more importantly is that providers like Office, they've explicitly stated that they want to see more companies leveraging DMAR and enforcing DMAR. So they want to see that you don't just have a none policy, you're using a quarantine and reject policy. Because Office actually mentioned, I'll send you a link to it, that if people are sending via, depending via SendGrid, via Klaviyo, so they don't have anything authenticated, they've explicitly stated that depending on the filters and firewalls that their customers are using, they may block the message or move it straight to spam. So this SPF, DKIM and DMAR stuff is going to be something that is super, super important and eventually probably required either on your own or at the ESP level, because there's just too much spam. Yeah, dude, this is awesome. And I know when I hit you up, I asked for five or 10 minutes of your time. We're not like 20 minutes, this is so sick. I have a feeling we're going to get you back on here another time to even do more. I did really want to give you an opportunity, I think over the past 15, 20 minutes, however long it's been, you've proven your expertise, but I'd love to open the floor up to you to kind of just talk about your background or anything that you're working on for anyone that was listening that got value to kind of hit you up about or check out. So off to you, Jesse, anything you want to discuss. Yeah, I think just to wrap it up too, I think the last record I wanted to talk about real quick is actually BIMI, so B-I-M-I. So if you guys are able to set up SPF, DKIM, and then roll out DMARC over a few weeks, the last thing to look into is BIMI. And I'll go ahead and send you some links so that people can look at it. But the really cool thing is that if you set up DMARC with the quarantine or reject policy, you can add BIMI, which is another record that you can only use it if your DMARC is being enforced. And what it does is it'll automatically display a logo in specific email providers. So you basically upload this record, you give them an SVG of your logo, and then now, I think Yahoo currently supports it, eventually Gmail will too. So every email you send will have your company logo so that your brand sticks out. So it's another incentive. Not only do you want better deliverability, but now if you set up BIMI, your logo will be displayed. And that's something not super important yet, but you can get ahead of the curve because Gmail is already testing it and they'll probably adopt it and fully roll it out in the next few months. Yeah, it's huge, thank you. And then in terms of me, I'm the founding partner of mailgenius.com. So if you guys want to kind of see and make sure that your domain is properly configured, one of the best ways to do that, because you guys can see it's very complex. There's so much that goes into all of this. I would say the simplest and easy way to do this is go to mailgenius.com, run a free test there. So just send an email from Clavio or any provider that you use. And then we're going to tell you literally what's your SPF, what's your DCAM, what's your DMARC. We'll give you a score. And then if you have issues, so like let's say something's incorrectly configured, we have comprehensive help desk articles on every topic. So if you want to learn more about SPF, if you want to learn more about DCAM, if you want to learn more about DMARC, anything we test for, you can literally do a deep dive and figure it out for yourself. But in the scenario where you prefer to just get it taken care of for you, you can message us on live chat. We can talk about consulting. But yeah, it's pretty simple. So be sure to check out mailgenius.com. And then I'm also working on some other things that are going to be pretty exciting, but no major releases yet. And then other than MailGenius, the best place to find you, how can people actually find you if they don't want to go to your site? Yeah, no, I would say probably just connect with me on LinkedIn. You can just find me Jesse Hernandez and then shoot me a message there. That's probably the best way for now. And then like I said, too, on the MailGenius site, you guys are welcome to, if you have a little issue, you can ping us on live chat. I'll at least point you in the right direction because this stuff is confusing and I'm trying to make it simpler a day at a time. Awesome. Yeah, man, this was great. I'm sure we're going to get a bunch of questions. So we'll have to get you up to do another one of these in the future. But Jesse, thank you so much for your time, bud. No problem, man. Thank you guys. Cheers.